November 24, 2023
Climate change is costing Americans bigtime.
It’s costing us in our everyday lives when it comes to our homes, insurance costs and our health – but – if it keeps up at this pace or gets worse, it’s also going to cost all of us taxpayers a lot of money.
How much money? According to a new government report – let’s put it this way – in the 1980’s when you adjust for inflation — the United States experienced on average one -billion dollar weather disaster every four months. Now – we’re dealing with an average of one – billion dollar weather disaster every three weeks. And in 2023 – we set a record for the number of billion dollar weather related disasters the government and all of us taxpayers had to pay for.
Before I get into all the details I want let you know this is a deep dive video. If you don’t have time to watch it now – favorite it and come back to it when you have a few minutes. Also I want to thank my subscribers for voting for this story as the bonus this week – if you want to vote too make sure you subscribe. You can subscribe during my next live event or you can follow these steps and subscribe right now.
Ok – back to this climate freight train coming right for us. This video is based on the 5th National Climate Assessment report. It’s a government report that was released last week and goes into a ton of detail about climate change impacts, risks and responses. Congress requires the government to compile this information every four years so they can make better decisions about budgeting, regulations and new laws. It is a massive report with 500 authors and so much data it’ll make your head spin.
But generally – it talks about how much climate change impacts our health and livelihoods because heat-related illnesses and death, droughts that reduce the production of crops and strain water systems, and larger, more severe wildfires that threaten homes and degrade air quality. It gives an assessment of evidence that the authors say proves that humans are responsible for the changes to earth’s climate. But – for the sake of keeping things simple – I’m going to focus this video only on what the report says about the increase of these billion dollar climate disasters and how much it’s currently costing the u-s government – and us taxpayers — to respond to these extreme climate related events.
Let me start with this – according to the report – extreme climate related weather events cost the u-s close to $150 billion each year—that’s a conservative estimate that does not account for loss of life, healthcare-related costs, or damages to services.
When climate related disaster happens it causes two things. One happens immediately and one happens eventually– it increases money that goes out of the government immediately and decreases the money that comes into the government eventually. So let’s start with how it impacts money that comes in to the government eventually — these climate related disasters damages homes and business. That means real estate values go down, household income goes down and the amount of money a business can make goes down – all of that has a negative impact on the amount of money going into the federal government because tax revenue decreases from property tax, income tax and business tax.
And on the flip side climate related disasters increase the amount of money the government has to spend immediately. FEMA and the government have to spend more right after the disaster to repair the infrastructure, provide disaster relief for the victims, increase the amount of money that goes into healthcare and pay more for public insurance. And all of that increases the cost the government pays to borrow money and increases the cost of government services. And this keeps happening over and over and over again and that’s how we get to that 150-billion dollars a year.
And here’s the thing — it’s happening more every decade. You can see in this graph the dramatic increase in the number of billion dollar disasters whether it’s a hurricane, wildfire, flood, drought, storm or freeze. You can see since the 1980s it just shoots up.
The government report says the number, frequency and intensity of these extreme events is going up – in part because of an increase in the value of the property that gets lost in these disasters, the number of locations that are now deemed hazard prone has increased over the years and the disproportionate effects of these climate related disasters on low income communities, communities of color and tribes and indigenous people because they often live closer to these hazard prone areas, in lots of cases they’re dealing with inadequate infrastructure and lack of disaster management resources.
So far in 2023 – the number of extreme weather related billion dollar disasters has increased again. This year – there have been 25. That is a record. The cost of all this – hasn’t been calculated yet – but it’s fair to say – we’ll probably be well over $200 billion.
So at this point in the video you’re probably wondering what is the government doing to keep these costs down? It’s unsustainable. Well, the white house announced $6 billion dollars in investments to make the country more resilient to the impacts of climate change by doing things like strengthening the aging electric grid, reducing the flood risk in vulnerable communities, upgrading the water infrastructure to improve drought resilience and offering grant money to support community driven projects that build on the community’s ability to respond to environmental challenges. All this money was made possible by congress when they passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill two years ago.
Of course the president has been pushing his climate agenda – but this is not just a united states problem – it’s a planet earth issue. And scientist say though we’ve have seen some progress over the years –and impressive advances in usage of renewable energy sources, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters are lagging far behind the climate goals they’ve set for themselves.
Read the full 5th Climate Assessment report here.
Read the 5th Climate Assessment cost analysis here.
Read the NOAA $1 billion+ disaster report here.
Read the White House $6 billion additional funding here.
